by M. Sparga

Created on: April 16, 2009

When you're designing a presentation in Microsoft PowerPoint, every decision you make about the formatting should enhance the content, not make it an eyesore or completely overshadow it. Backgrounds for your slides are no exception.

Backgrounds in PowerPoint presentations can help set your slides apart from ones with blank or boring backgrounds, and they can also give multiple presentations a uniform look. However, they can also be distracting to the audience and possibly even make the text hard to read.

The dilemma of whether or not to use a fancy background depends, of course, on the content and formatting of the rest of the presentation. If your slides contain a lot of bar graphs, scatter plots, flow charts, or other visuals, then a background with a busy pattern will probably detract from the message shown by your data. But a simple background, perhaps a solid color or vague pattern with a border, is less likely to distract the audience.

No matter what sort of background you decide to use in your presentation, it's crucial that you make sure the text and any important borderlines or graphics stand out properly. You want a good contrast between the text and line colors and the background. For example, think about how helpful it is when you highlight important text that's typed in black ink with a yellow highlighter. The sharp contrast between the text and background color makes reading the words easy on the eyes. You want to give your audience the same courtesy.

Once you've settled on a background - blank or otherwise - that works well for one of your presentations, you may want to consider whether it would make a good template for all of your other related presentations. For example, if you are putting together presentations to go on your company's website, then a standard, uniform look to each of the presentations helps build consistency and familiarity in the viewers' minds. That is, it looks professional and helps extend your company's brand image.

As you assemble your PowerPoint presentation, keep in mind the potential benefits and downfalls of backgrounds for your slides. Consider what works best with the content of the presentation, and most of all, think about how easy everything will be to read from the audience's point of view. One of the great things about using PowerPoint is that it's convenient to experiment with a lot of the formatting, so don't be afraid to experiment with backgrounds until you find what works best for your presentation.

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